I also see a lot of presence in your work. You use your body, your fluids. It feels very personal, almost like a diary.

​It’s a lot about presence and trace. I’ve always been skeptical of the idea of a purely digital self. Even as a teenager, when my schoolmates would lose their mind over the idea of having a digital avatar, I didn’t really see the point. I understand the fascination with the unknown, but not really the need for that as opposed to a physically boring life.

 

Sometimes I see a dragonfly and tear up, man. I never had that in the online universe. Feelings come from the body, and while thoughts can be digitized, feelings and sensation simply cannot. We are what we are because of the body, and we also stop being what we are because of its death. It is quite irrational, but the work has always had the role of the only trustworthy trace of me ever being here. It’s the body’s imperfection that allows life, in the end. We tend to avoid its reality, yet it is always there, and the work becomes a way of accepting it, of finding something magical within it. The mere fact that my body can inhale the air between me and you and keep surviving on a planet is sheer magic- on top of being biology. When my grandmother died, I felt sadness, but also a clear awareness that death is part of life, and I even felt guilty for crying: I was not sad because she could not see any more daisies, I was sad because of my impossibility to hang out more with her.

 

The awareness of such selfishness at the unripe age of thirteen almost destroyed me. But in the end, it just made me more curious about the complex creatures we are. I am realizing I definitely think about humans in a particular way. For instance, I find it difficult to hate people- even those I deeply disagree with- because there is always something in our past that justifies certain behaviors. We are all capable of being awful. So I do feel pity, but I’m somehow ashamed that I would probably not even hate the person who kills me. They must come from a point where it does make sense to kill me, you see what I mean?

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And you also work with natural fluids.

Yes. Rain, seawater, moss, dew. I love humidity, I thrive in symbolically foggy situations. The work is a tool for existing in a way that allows me to feel alive, especially in a hideous and imperfect way. On the surface, I might give the impression of a very polished human- and I am, in most ways- but I would never neglect those parts of myself that are socially coded as disregardable.

 

In the end, our bodies look very polished from the outside, sure- but the insides can be quite groovy and disgusting to an untrained eye. I thrive in those areas. The conversion and distillation of the hideous into something sublime. I grew up in nature, so I miss that organic presence of a natural rhythm given by the ocean, the rain, the wind. Moving to the city at the age of eighteen and never really coming back for good created a need to reconnect to that, which became evident in the bodily nature of the work. Even in the city, it becomes a way to reconnect to an ancestral future.

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Are you planning more residencies in nature, like the one you did in Melides, Portugal? 

Yes, I’m opening up to residencies as they reach out to me over time. These occasions allow for a full immersion in one’s bubble, which I am not really able to facilitate on my own. I tend to work in waves, with periods of isolation followed by a return to the world.

 

I am soon going to be hosted for a residency at Villa Gamberaia in Florence, curated by Emmanuela Mazzoni, with another artist whose work I deeply respect. Then in the autumn I am spending a full month by the sea near Marseille, in an experimental architectural structure, building the foundations for what could be my first show in a museum.